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What Ferguson Says About the Fear of Social Media

By Anna North November 25, 2014 4:28 pmNovember 25, 2014 4:28 pm

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Credit Scott Olson/Getty Images

“The most significant challenge encountered in this investigation has been the 24-hour news cycle and its insatiable appetite for something, for anything, to talk about. Following closely behind were the nonstop rumors on social media.”

So said the St. Louis County prosecutor, Robert McCulloch, in his statement Monday night, explaining that Officer Darren Wilson would not be indicted in the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown. His argument that social media had somehow hampered efforts to find out the truth about Michael Brown’s death rang false to many, who felt that social media had in fact been a crucial tool for standing up to a justice system that seemed to be failing its citizens.

“In Ferguson and the St. Louis area,” writes Sarah Seltzer at Flavorwire, “social media has been there to document outrageous moments, large and small, from awful press conferences to terrifying nights of tear gas arrests and guns pointed at protesters. Social media brought the ‘mainstream media’ to town, kept the nation’s eye on their city, and rightly turned this story into one with national, even global, symbolism and ramifications.”

And she argues that social media has given people a voice when those in power prefer to ignore them:

“Social media has shifted the focus on a number of other pressing issues, essentially creating a pipeline between localized instances of injustice on the ground and the national dialogue. Thus, Mike Brown’s killing and the ensuing protests became a national story. Wendy Davis and grassroots activists fighting the closure of abortion clinics became a national story. Campus rape’s persistence became a national story. As they all deserve to be, because each local outrage is an example of a disturbing macro trend. Yet such genuine outpourings contrast with the stalwart refusal of actual authority figures to listen to people’s demands and hear their testimonies.”

At Bustle, Lulu Chang writes that “the decision to point the finger at the masses of Americans who have fought for justice through their own mediums is ludicrous at best, and cruel at worst.”

“Social media,” she adds, “as tweeters have pointed out, did not kill Mike Brown. If anything, social media immortalized him, and allowed his name to live on beyond his untimely death.” And, she concludes, “the conversations that we should be having following the decision in the Mike Brown case is not how social media hurt, but how social media has, can, and should continue to help prove that all lives matter in the United States, no matter how much our justice system says they shouldn’t.”

And social media users have indeed been continuing their work in the wake of Mr. McCulloch’s announcement. Editors at Racialicious have posted a selection of images from Twitter, depicting peaceful protests. “Demonstrators marched — peacefully — both in Ferguson and around the country,” they write. “These activists were not alone, and they will not be the last. This space is to recognize their presence, despite the insistence of certain narratives that they were not.”

The Ferguson National Response Network’s Tumblr lists demonstrations, rallies and vigils around the world in the coming days.

Others have used Twitter to recommend donations to the Ferguson Municipal Public Library, which Lauren Walker of Newsweek reports will remain open Tuesday although Ferguson schools are closed.

At Time, James Poniewozik (whom Ms. Seltzer cites in her piece) points out that those in authority may have good reason to fear social media — because its users can hold them to account. He writes:

“I suspect part of what’s behind the frustration of people like McCulloch is that social media makes everyone a critic. Thousands and thousands of people are watching over your shoulder to see if you slip up, checking what you missed, judging whether you were thorough enough, questioning your agenda. Good. Having everyone watch you do your job, or not do it, may be a pain, it may be stressful, but in an imperfect justice system, it’s not exactly a bad thing.”

And it’s not just law enforcement that’s now subject to the potential check of online scrutiny: “While McCulloch argued that social media made it harder to get to the truth in Ferguson, it was often social media that first got out the truth on the ground — and that raised questions that reporters on site were not always asking first. If prosecutors and police now have to deal with the public surveilling them on social media, so does that 24-hour news media that McCulloch described.”

“The prying, judging eyes of social media may be a hassle for authorities — for lawyers, for law enforcement and for the media itself,” Mr. Poniewozik writes. “But we’re all better off for it.”

And indeed, Mr. McCulloch isn’t alone in taking social media to task. Earlier this year, Brittney Cooper looked at criticism of social media on the left — specifically, at the journalist Michelle Goldberg’s critique of the activist Suey Park’s #CancelColbert Twitter campaign and at the claim that online feminism had become “toxic.” Ms. Cooper wrote at Salon that “it is the very expansion of the number of voices that has white liberals so shook.” And, she added:

“The various social media and activist campaigns taken up by radical people of color on the left are not about censoring white folks’ speech. They are not about calling white liberals racist. They are about forcing an acknowledgment that racism is painful, harmful and unacceptable. These campaigns force white folks to actually listen to people of color.”

Also on criticisms of Suey Park and #CancelColbert, Julia Carrie Wong wrote at The Nation, “I think that the real problem most people have with Park is that she has power.”

“The power to direct thousands of people on social media and drive a narrative without permission from any editor, publication or other form of traditional media gatekeeper is one that many in journalism wish they had and (I suspect) believe they deserve more than Park,” she added. “We are not used to women of color, and especially supposedly submissive Asian women, acting with such brash disregard of their elders and ‘betters.’”

Mr. McCulloch’s argument that social media use was a “challenge” to the investigation may be telling. To some, what anti-social media arguments reveal is a fear of challenge, a fear that Twitter and other platforms may provide marginalized people with new tools for standing up to authority, new ways of speaking up.

In his essay on Ferguson at Today in Tabs, Bijan Stephen doesn’t talk about social media. But he does talk, arguably, about challenge, in his account of what happened to him and a friend at a nightclub:

“The bouncer looked at her ID — she’s black like me — deemed it fake, and, for some reason, rendered it unusable. He broke it in half. We called the manager and I was angry, trying and failing to explain to him why this was not okay. He told me I was too drunk — I wasn’t — and told me to take a walk to cool off. I walked to a bodega and walked back. He wouldn’t let me in. I wasn’t a writer then, or I didn’t see myself as one, though I was writing for places that people might have heard of. I finally threatened him with words. I told him I’d write about him, and that was when he became as angry as me. He finally saw me.”

Mr. McCulloch may not think much of the contributions of social media to the Ferguson investigation — but, it appears, he has seen them.

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